Recently I have been thinking a lot about assessment. My teachable is art and from a student’s perspective it is tricky to understand how. I always questioned how do you mark art.
I was having a valuable conversation with the art teacher at my seminar school. They were talking about the possibility of not separating the students by age, but skill instead. In their art class there is a huge range of ability and understandably so. They cater to the needs of the students by designing projects based on the skill levels of the students. Even within the projects, there is room to for the students’ capabilities. They are more flexible with their expectations then potentially other subjects. This is how I want to be. I want to cater to the expectations of the individual.The assessments will be more on an individual basis.
In my art specific class we are trying to keep our lesson plans adaptable to a multitude of levels. We were trying to make it potentially stretch all the grade levels, nevermind just within one classroom. I think that will be important when I witnessed in a real classroom how much of a different in skill level the students have.
I found something really monumental in one of my classes where we are building a unit plan. It was think of you lesson first and then figure out how you can intertwine it with the curriculum. One of the other students mentioned they had tried to do it the other way before and it felt pretty floundery (yes, I know this is a made up word) and vague. I see it as a connection to content then curriculum and then assessment based off of that. This youtube video, while it might not be of the highest caliber, I really like the concept behind it.
As time goes on, I’m attempting to have more and more discussions about how you can assess the arts. It is a difficult question I seem to keep getting different answers to. I guess this is something that I will just have to keep digging into. There will be a day soon I actually have to do this.
